Politics

We’ve just come through a statewide election in which candidates competed for the title of “Most Likely To Reform State Government.” Campaign finance reform, ethics reform, tax reform, education reform, reform reform. And almost nothing happened. Like the weather, everybody talks about it, but nobody does anything. Until now. Quietly, effectively, smartly, the Assembly and Senate have crafted legislation to fundamentally …

Given all the words and images devoted to the midterm elections over the past few weeks, you’d think the results had told us something vital about the future of the country. In reality, they were just a curtain-raiser. It’s the next few weeks and months that really matter. The big question, as the old Congress reconvenes and prepares to make …

The Tea Party and the hard right have made it easy to dismiss their side of the national debate about American liberty. It’s often hard to see through the birthers, the Obama-as-socialist crowd, and the “legitimate rape” folks. That would be a mistake. We’re in the midst of a real debate about personal freedom and national well-being, and there’s a …

Before the tryptophan in the turkey induces somnolence, give thanks for living in such an entertaining country. This year, for example, we learned that California’s Legislature includes 93 people who seem never to have had sex. They enacted the “affirmative consent” law, directing college administrators to tell students that sexual consent cannot be silence but must be “affirmative, conscious and …

The election is over, thank goodness. It was a shallow and unsatisfying exercise of the right to vote. Ideas and decisions were set aside and squabbling and insult reigned. Republican Rob Astorino never offered a coherent alternative vision and Democratic Gov. Andrew Cuomo had no desire or need to fill the vacuum. Inevitably, the issues we should have been thinking about will …

I’ve been thinking a lot about why so few New Yorkers voted in the last election. We saw Democrats stay home, young people stay home, and people of color stay home. In fact, just 31.5% of voters turned out to pull the lever for governor and other offices–the lowest turnout ever recorded. Why? I don’t think it’s just a failure …

ALBANY, NY – November 15, 2014 — Howie Hawkins, the recent Green Party candidate for Governor, said today that the Green Party will build upon its 5 percent vote by organizing and advocating with the mostly working-class majority that is not voting. 70 percent of eligible voters did not vote in the November 4 election. “We will continue beating the …

Because of its power to influence public affairs, the press has long been known as “the Fourth Estate.” But I think the media may have been displaced. These days, it’s lobbyists who seem to carry the most clout in Washington. Here’s a case in point. When Congress closed at the beginning of August for its end-of-summer recess, it faced wide-scale …